I made my husband a Burn-Away Cake for his birthday. Cakes are literally on fire all over the internet. I love this burn-away cake technique that’s been trending on social media over the past month so of course I had to give it a try 😃.
Ingredients/Supplies
- a cake frosted with chocolate ganache or buttercream
- blueberries, blackberries & mint leaves (or additional buttercream for piping a border around the cake)
- edible icing/frosting sheet (affiliate link)
- edible rice wafer paper (affiliate link)
- edible ink & printer*
* The images are usually printed using edible ink & printers. If you don’t have one, you can order a kit from ink4paper. If this is not an option either, you can print the images with a regular printer but on the edible icing sheet and wafer paper (not regular printer paper). If you’re not using edible ink, you can place a cake board between the cake and the thick edible icing sheet to ensure the ink doesn’t pass through the icing sheet and touches your cake.
Directions
You can watch this video to see how I made the cake or read the details below.
I baked and filled my cake and covered it in chocolate ganache with a splash of gold. But, I could have covered it in buttercream as well. In fact, most burn-away cakes on social media are covered in buttercream frosting. Since we’re not big fans of buttercream, I chose chocolate.
Then, I printed an image on a thick white icing / frosting sheet. This is the image that will reveal my husband’s birthday present.
I printed a second image on a thin sheet of wafer paper. This is the image that will get burned to reveal the icing sheet beneath. I cut the first image to almost the circumference of the cake and the second image about 2 cm (3/4 in) smaller in circumference.
Now let’s explain the science behind this a bit. Wafer paper burns easily because it’s made of starch and oil, while the thicker, sugar-based frosting sheet has a wet consistency, is not highly flammable and remains intact.
I placed the first thick image on top of the cake. Then, I made a border of blueberries. Most people use frosting and pipe a border around the cake. But, as I mentioned before, our family prefers chocolate.
Then, I placed the wafer paper on top and placed more blueberries and blackberries around the border to hide the edge of the paper. You can secure the berries with melted chocolate to ensure they don’t fall over. If I were to use buttercream, I would just pipe another border around.
The berries border or frosting border between the two layers serves a specific purpose and that is to leave a slight gap so that the wafer paper has room to burn.
Then, light it on fire and let it burn to reveal the surprise!
